The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics

Summary

Barton Swaim was struggling to find an academic job—he’d recently received a PhD in English—when he sent his resume to Mark Sanford, the conservative and controversial governor of South Carolina. He thought he could improve the governor’s writing and speeches.

On the surface, this is the story of Sanford’s rise and fall. But it’s really an account of what happens when a band of believers attach themselves to an ambitious narcissist. Everyone knows this kind of politician—a charismatic maverick who goes up against the system and its ways, but thinks he doesn’t have to live by the rules. Swaim describes what makes people invest in their leaders, how those leaders do provide moments of inspiration, and then how they let them down.

The Speechwriter is a funny and candid introduction to the world of politics, where press statements are purposefully nonsensical, grammatical errors are intentional, and better copy means more words. Through his three years in the governor’s office, Swaim paints a portrait of a man so principled he’d rather sweat than use state money to pay for air conditioning, so oblivious he’d wear the same stained shirt for two weeks, so egotistical he’d belittle his staffers to make himself feel better, and so self-absorbed he never once apologized for making his administration the laughing stock of the country. In the end, it’s also an account of the very human staffers who risk a life in politics out of conviction and learn to survive a broken heart.

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The Speechwriter - Barton Swaim

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1

THE DUMPS

About twenty of us sat in the conference room waiting for the boss to walk in. The room was warm and smelled faintly of sweat. A pair of law clerks quietly debated the correct pronunciation of debacle. At last Paul asked what the meeting was about. I think, June said, the governor wants to apologize to the staff. She said it with a wry look, but nobody laughed.

Stewart looked up from a magazine. He already did that, he snapped. He apologized to his mistress, and to his family—.

In that order, Paul said.

Nervous laughter made its way around the room.

I don’t think we can handle another apology, Stewart went on, throwing down the magazine. Because let me tell you, I know what an apology from this governor sounds like, and it ain’t really an apology. It’s more like—.

He paused.

Someone said, More like what?

I’ll just put it this way. His apologies tend to have an unapologetic tone.

Another minute passed, and then the governor walked in. All went silent. He sat in the only remaining chair and made jokes with one of the interns.

A week before, he had been openly talked about by influential commentators in New York and Washington as a presidential candidate. In national media reports, his name had been routinely used in conjunction with the terms principled stand,courageous,crazy,unbalanced, and interesting. The party’s biggest donors had begun to call him and to pay him visits. Now he was the punch line to a thousand jokes; letters demanding his resignation appeared in newspapers; the word impeachment circulated through the capital like rumors of an assassination plot.

How are y’all? he said. Wait—don’t answer that.

More nervous laughter.

Aahh. That was his preface to saying anything significant. Aahh. But that’s why I called you in here. I just wanted to say the obvious, which is the obvious.

Paul gave me a look of incomprehension.

I mean, the obvious—which is that I caused the storm we’re now in. And that’s made everything a little more difficult for everybody in here, and for that I want to say the obvious, which is that I apologize. But you know—he rose up in his seat to an upright posture—you know, I was telling one of the boys—the governor had four sons—this morning. We were up early and I was saying, ‘Look, the sun came up today.’ It’s a beautiful thing to see. And it’s a beautiful thing regardless of the storms of life. Of which this is one.

People shifted in their seats and glanced at each other questioningly.

As it happens, the governor went on, and before this storm started, I’d been reading Viktor Frankl’s book about being in a concentration camp. And it’s just incredible to me how you can find beauty, you can find reasons to keep going, in the most appalling circumstances. And I just wanted to say to everybody, keep your head up. Keep pushing forward. And let’s not be in the dumps here. The sun came up today. Aahh. We’re not in a concentration camp. So let’s not stay in the dumps. We can’t make much progress on the important things if we’re in the dumps. So if you’re in the dumps, get out. I mean, of the dumps. Get out of the dumps.

Nobody spoke.

Aahh. So, anybody want to say anything? Comments? Pearls of wisdom?

Still no one spoke.

Okay, well—.

Actually I’d like to say something. That was Stella.

Okay.

I just want to say—. Actually maybe I shouldn’t.

No, it’s okay, the governor smiled, go ahead.

No, I think I won’t.

You sure?

Mm. Yeah.

The governor walked out. Stewart looked around the room and said, For those of you who are newer to the office, that was the governor’s version of a pep talk. Do you feel pepped?

Later that afternoon I asked Stella what she’d been intending to say. She had often told me that she didn’t like her job—her husband wanted her to keep it for the income—and had often tried to get herself fired. I thought this might have been one of those times. She narrowed her eyes and pointed at me. You know what I was about to say? You really want to know? I was going to say, ‘You know what, governor—maybe what you say is true. Maybe we should be thankful that we’re not in a concentration camp.’ You could hear a slight tremor in her voice. ‘And maybe we take the sun rising for granted, and we shouldn’t. But you’re not really the one who should tell us that right now. And if you do say anything, it should be more like Sorry I flushed all your work down the toilet, people. Sorry I made you all a joke. Sorry about your next job interview, the one where you’re going to be brought in as a curiosity and then laughed at.’

Stella, I wish you had said that.

She had tears in her eyes.

2

THE WRITER

I first met the governor almost three years earlier. We were in his office with Rick, his chief of staff. I introduced myself; he said, A pleasure; and we sat down. He wore blue jeans and a navy polo. There was a bleached streak across the front of the polo, which was untucked. His half-eaten lunch, a sandwich and chips, sat in Styrofoam on the coffee table in front of him. He took another bite of it, eating only the interior of the sandwich with a fork, and mumbled an apology for eating. Then he closed the Styrofoam box, pushed it aside, and sat upright.

For a few long seconds he said nothing. Then it seemed he wanted to speak. His mouth formed a circle, as if whatever he wanted to say began with a w.

Wwwww, he said, staring upward. Then he fixed his eyes on Rick. Wwwwwha.

Rick seemed ready to interject, but at last the governor said, Www. What are we doing here?

Rick introduced me. He’s here to talk about joining us in the press office. He’s a writer.

Oh, the writer. Now engaged, the governor looked at me and asked if I knew some name or other. I said I didn’t. He said this guy had had the job before me, that he’d been a writer at The State. He was a good guy. But he’d had to tell him it wasn’t working out and he needed to find something else. The governor hadn’t kicked him out onto the streets, he said, just told him he needed to find something else. He couldn’t find my voice.

The governor was very interested in this larger idea of a brand, he said. Every written product with his name on it had to be in the same style and have the same cadence; people should be able to read it and know it was his, whether or not they agreed with it. He mentioned the name of a famous politician and the name of his speechwriter. Every speech he gives, every op-ed or whatever, sounds the same. Not the same, like boring the same. From the same source, consistent. I like that. It’s about consistency. You always know what you’re getting.

I said consistency was a good thing in a politician. It suggested reliability. I thought I’d blundered in using the word politician, but he said, Reliability. That’s a good word for it.

He had seen some articles and reviews I’d written and conceded I must be erudite but wondered whether I could write in a way that the mechanic in Greenwood can understand. (Greenwood is a small town in the western part of the state.) I was trying to explain that I could when he interrupted me. Can you start a sentence with a preposition?

A preposition? I asked. Yes, a preposition. Maybe he meant a conjunction?

Wwwhatever, he said.

Well, it depends.

On what?

I said the rule against beginning sentences with conjunctions was a very old rule and nobody really followed it anymore. Also, initial conjunctions are useful. In a tightly reasoned paragraph you need to turn your argument in different directions very quickly, and the best way to do it is usually to start your sentences with But or Yet or—

Okay, whatever, he said, flashing his great smile. There’s a rule against beginning a sentence with a prepositions—conjunctions, whatever—and you can’t break rules. He told me to take a stab at an op-ed on the folly of carving out special tax breaks for green energy companies or something like that and get it to Rick by the next morning.

A few days later the governor called me. He said something about pay, but so shocked and flattered was I by receiving a call from a sitting governor that I couldn’t gather my thoughts sufficiently to negotiate a salary. When I hung up the phone, I was very pleased with myself.

I had been working in a library for three long years. I had come back from Scotland in late 2003 with a PhD in English almost in hand, and like most people with freshly attained doctoral degrees in English I had lots of specialized knowledge, high expectations, no job or even job offers, a growing family, and very little money. During those three years working at the library—my chief duty was to attach call number stickers to the spines of books—I had allowed a little anger to creep in. Which was a bitter surprise to me because I had always had a sunny disposition. Then one morning on my walk to work I found myself cursing under my breath for no evident reason. Was I angry at God? At myself for having had such preposterous expectations? Yes in both cases. But it didn’t matter; there I was, a doctor making minimum wage performing a low-skill job I conceitedly thought was beneath me. My job title was annex processor, which was funny because I had long hated the word process. There’s something dishonest about it: processed cheese isn’t cheese, process theology isn’t theology, process music isn’t music, negotiations given the term peace process never end in peace, and a processing fee is almost by definition a lump of money charged to the customer for no other reason than that the customer is unlikely to notice. So that was me, a processor.

There was one wonderful thing about that job, though. It was a university library and I could find almost any book I wanted. I’d begun writing essays and reviews for magazines—the Times Literary Supplement, the Weekly Standard—and having instant access to millions of titles made the research part easy. Moderate success in nonacademic writing led me to wonder if I should drop the idea of an academic job and try for something else entirely, something other than grading papers and going to faculty meetings and turning out articles read by no one but people looking for their own names among the footnotes. I now had a wife and two small children, and I liked where I lived, so getting a job on an oil tanker or joining the military was not an option.

What could I do well? I could write. I had always heard that you can’t make a living by writing, but the idea of turning phrases for a living still seemed irresistible. Maybe you couldn’t write essays and reviews and novels for a living (I mean, excluding unusual circumstances like writing a breakaway best seller or being married to an anesthesiologist or getting a plum job as a writer-in-residence at a university), but you could turn out copy for somebody else. One morning I picked up the newspaper and turned to the opinion page. There was an op-ed by the governor about the state budget then being debated in the General Assembly. It began:

Bolton, our third son, has always liked the story of the three bears—of the papa, mama and baby bear, and of the porridge being hot, cold and eventually just right. Work has begun on the state budget, and because that means hot, cold or just right now deals with your money, it’s worth sizing up whether or not you think things are indeed right in this year’s budget.

Without reading any further, I resolved to send him my résumé. I attached a cover letter. It was deferential but terse and said something like I don’t know that much about state politics, but I know how to write, and you need a writer. A few weeks later I found myself in his office talking with him about brand and voice.

For a long time the job of speechwriter had sounded romantic to me. The speechwriter, I felt, was a person whose job it was to put words in the mouths of the powerful, who understood the import and varieties of political language and guided his master through its perils. The speechwriter was a clandestine character; until recently, anyway, you didn’t hear much about presidential speechwriters until after the president left office, and even then not much. An air of mystery hangs about the word itself: Speechwriter or speech writer? One word or two? A speechwriter has all the gratification of being a writer but has political power too, or at least a veneer of it, which was good enough for me.

When I started working for the governor, I didn’t do any writing for a week or two. Mainly I just sat behind my desk trying to look busy. At some point the press secretary, Aaron, told me to read through the op-ed book. This was a giant three-ring binder of photocopies of the governor’s published writing over the first four years of his administration. (His second term had begun just a month or two earlier.) Reading the op-ed book would help me get used to the governor’s voice, Aaron told me.

I spent a few hours reading these pieces. It worried me that I didn’t hear much of a voice. What I heard was more like a cough. Or the humming of a bad melody, with most of the notes sharp. One sentence stands out in my memory: This is important not only because I think it ought to be a first order of business, but because it makes common sense.

At that time there were four of us in the press shop or, to speak more correctly, the communications office. Aaron sat at the big desk: he was the communications director, comms director, press secretary, or spokesman. He had been a reporter for one of the regional papers during the boss’s first run for governor. He had asked the candidate relentlessly difficult questions and seemed to enjoy it. Aaron’s fearlessness, together with his smoking habit, love of rap music, slovenly attire, and youth—he was only twenty-five during that first campaign—all suggested the kind of scorch-and-burn libertarianism that became the governor’s brand. The governor-elect (as he became in the fall of